is not an end, as we presume in books; but rather a beginning.  Not even death is final.  We find our graves not in the ground but in the hearts of our survivors, and our slightest actions vibrate in ever-widening circles through incalculable time.  Any end, therefore, to a novel or a play, must be in the nature of an artifice; and an ending must be planned not in accordance with life, which is lawless and illogical, but in accordance with art, whose soul is harmony.  It must be a strictly logical result of all that has preceded it.  Having begun with a certain intention, the true artist must complete his pattern, in accordance with laws more rigid than those of life; and he must not disrupt his design by an illogical intervention of the long arm of coincidence.  Stevenson has stated this point in a letter to Mr. Sidney Colvin:  “Make another end to it?  Ah, yes, but that’s not the way I write; the whole tale is implied; I never use an effect when I can help it, unless it prepares the effects that are to follow; that’s what a story consists in.  To make another end, that is to make the beginning all wrong.”  In this passage the whole question is considered merely from the point of view of art.  It is the only point of view which is valid for the novelist; for him the question is comparatively simple, and Stevenson’s answer, emphatic as it is, may be accepted as final.  But the dramatist has yet another factor to consider,—­the factor of his audience.

The drama is a more popular art than the novel, in the sense that it makes its appeal not to the individual but to the populace.  It sets a contest of human wills before a multitude gathered together for the purpose of witnessing the struggle; and it must rely for its interest largely upon the crowd’s instinctive sense of partisanship.  As Marlowe said, in Hero and Leander,—­

    When two are stripped, long e’er the course begin,
    We wish that one should lose, the other win.

The audience takes sides with certain characters against certain others; and in most cases it is better pleased if the play ends in a victory for the characters it favors.  The question therefore arises whether the dramatist is not justified in cogging the dice of chance and intervening arbitrarily to insure a happy outcome to the action, even though that outcome violate the rigid logic of the art of narrative.  This is a very important question; and it must not be answered dogmatically.  It is safest, without arguing ex cathedra, to accept the answer of the very greatest dramatists.  Their practice goes to show that such a violation of the strict logic of art is justifiable in comedy, but is not justifiable in what we may broadly call the serious drama.  Moliere, for instance, nearly always gave an arbitrary happy ending to his comedies.  Frequently, in the last act, he introduced a long lost uncle, who arrived upon the scene just in time to endow the hero and heroine with a fortune and to say “Bless you,